The Archive of Archive - Welcome Week Part 1 - Scheduled Content

As a latecomer to the enterprise scheme, I was a little nervous about welcome week. Would everyone be super-duper neat and polished businesspeople with years of experience behind their backs? Would everyone be wearing suits? Would there be lunch provided? Lots of scary questions. But in the end it turned out fairly nicely. Rather than breaking down the week chronologically, I'll instead talk about the distinct sections. It's easier to remember and record things that way.

The biggest chunk of the scheduled week was spent with the instructors discussing how the year would work. It was broken into a series of shorter talks (assumedly because most of the chairs in the corner were pretty uncomfortable) about the various elements of the scheme. Whilst filled with useful information about the year and beyond, there's not a whole heap to report on here as everyone's experience would be the same pretty much, except perhaps the lucky people who got the comfy seats.

A couple of these talks featured guest speakers from previous EPY businesses. These were seriously useful and gave a proper insight into what would be coming, in a slightly more informal and memorable manner. They discussed scary topics like the fragility of partnerships but also talked about sillier things like making strange flavours of vodka. It was a lot of fun. Afterwards we also got the chance to talk with Ink, another graphic design and animation company from last year, who offered us a huge heap of incredibly useful advice. Like seriously, thanks guys. You're the best. 

Plus we got to try a little bit of the fancy alcohol.

In the slightly more unusual end of things, we did a visit to a local pipe-cleaner factory. The only one in Britain apparently. Admittedly not what I was expecting to be doing this week. On the plus side, the factory was a fairly interesting place. Sadly we didn't learn a huge amount from the talking that happened along the way as we were all wearing earplugs. It was hard to make things out. After the tour we were told all about the many uses of pipecleaners, and continued the week's unofficial theme of businesses evolving over time. It was interesting. But perhaps the most interesting stuff was to be found by just looking around the factory. It was full of interesting stuff. In particular the martial arts classes upstairs were an unusual thing for a factory to have. But the most memorable part of the entire trip was seeing the board of people who had worked at the factory for 'forty years of unbroken service' to the factory. That stirred up a lot of strange feelings in me. It's both heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. I didn't even know that was possible.

A couple of days later, Mr. Pipecleaner returned for a mini-project where we had to come up with new uses for pipecleaners. It was...interesting. As an idea presentation session it hit all the right notes. Everyone worked hard and the presentations were well arranged and strong. But my main problem lay with the pipecleaners themselves. Despite a few cool ideas, the brief just felt like it was dead before it arrived. Pipecleaners are just too limiting. Almost every winning idea could be summed up as 'cleaning something different'. Admittedly it's hard to come up with extra uses for pipecleaners (so massive kudos to Team Sex Toy in that regard), but I feel the more unusual ideas should have had more credit than simply 'clean some things'. 

Preceding that was a pair of workshops about organisation and creativity. The former was the better of the two, and whilst it flirted with many ideas I'd come across before, it managed to throw a couple of brand new ones into the mixing pot that I'd never heard of before. I'll definetely be using some of those in the years to come. Following that was the far weaker creativity one. Admittedly creativity is a hard topic to work around but I don't feel it managed to explore very much useful stuff at all. The main positives to be gleaned were the 'everyone can be creative' beats from the beginning as that's an important one to remember, as well as a couple of brief points about idea generation before the workshop wandered off elsewhere.

As for the rest, we had a few smaller exercises mostly based around getting to know one another. Pretty simple stuff but incredibly useful at the same time.

To wrap up the scheduled welcome week discussion, I have to say I did enjoy it. It was certainly an information-heavy affair, but that's hard to avoid. My main advice for next week would be to spread it over three days and have slightly longer days with a couple of the less useful workshops cut out. I feel by the end of the week most of us just wanted to get on with it. But all in all, rather good.